PROJECT OVERVIEW
This website provides an electronic annotated edition of the French philosophical journal Les Cahiers pour l’Analyse. Edited by a small group of Louis Althusser’s students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the Cahiers pour l’Analyse appeared in ten volumes between 1966 to 1969 – arguably the most fertile and productive years in French philosophy during the whole of the twentieth century. Guided by the examples of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser and Georges Canguilhem, the Cahiers were conceived as a contribution to a philosophy based on the primacy of concepts and the rigour of logic and formalisation, in opposition to philosophies based on lived experience or the interpretation of meaning.
The Cahiers were soon recognised as one of the most significant and innovative philosophical projects of its time. The journal published landmark texts by many of the most influential thinkers of the day, including Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Lacan, and Leclaire. Many of the young students and writers closely involved in the production of the Cahiers (e.g. Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, François Regnault and Alain Badiou) were soon to become major figures in French intellectual life.
The website is the main product of a three-year research project funded by the AHRC (2006-2009). It includes a full electronic edition of the original French texts in both html and facsimile pdf versions, together with detailed commentaries on each article, recent interviews with members of the original editorial board, and substantial entries on the main concepts and authors at issue in the journal. Other components of the research project included an international conference on the Cahiers and its legacy, held at Middlesex University on 21-22 May 2009, and two edited volumes on the Cahiers, entitled Concept and Form. These volumes are forthcoming from Verso in 2011: the first includes English translations of a selection of texts published in the Cahiers, the second is a collection of newly commissioned essays on the journal and translated extracts of interviews with members of the editorial board.
The lead investigator on the project was Peter Hallward; Christian Kerslake served as the project research fellow, in collaboration first with Ray Brassier and then Knox Peden.
Website can be found here:
http://www.web.mdx.ac.uk/cahiers/
Content summary found here:
http://www.web.mdx.ac.uk/cahiers/concepts.html
